


Like Blood From a Stone

by Lady_Vibeke



Series: Cara Dune & Din Djarin: Tales of Two Space Idiots in Love [33]
Category: The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Blood and Injury, Caretaking, Communication Issues, Developing Relationship, F/M, Gen, Idiots in Love, Mutual Pining, Reunions, They Don't Talk About It™, but it's time they do, difficult conversations, post s01e08
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-07 03:00:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26319823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lady_Vibeke/pseuds/Lady_Vibeke
Summary: “There are...thingsI don't know how to say,” he admits, uncomfortably aware of how true this is. Cara taps her fist upon his knee, shaking her head indulgently.“There is only so much I can guess, buddy,” she replies softly, all irritation gone from her face. “And this thing doesn't really help,” she adds, touching two fingers in the middle of his visor.“You know what I mean, right?” she asks, head tipped to one side. “A lot of stuff can be conveyed by exchanging a look, but if two people can't look each other in the eye, some things just need to be spoken.”Din feels helpless. He can fight warriors, mudhorns, mechs, but when it comes to put himself into words he stumbles—falls, most of the times. And when these black eyes are staring at him so intensely, his helplessness degenerates into sheer panic. It's too much—what he has inside, what Cara makes him feel. It's powerful and inescapable, like the warm flame the child has ignited inside him, but the child doesn't need words, doesn't need complicated explanations.“Is it too late?” Din inquires, just a shy whisper that almost doesn't make it past his lips.“For what?”“To speak.”
Relationships: Baby Yoda (The Mandalorian TV) & Cara Dune & The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV), Cara Dune/The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV)
Series: Cara Dune & Din Djarin: Tales of Two Space Idiots in Love [33]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1709416
Comments: 18
Kudos: 98





	Like Blood From a Stone

The Sakiyan's heavy foot is pressed over Din's windpipe, cutting his air intake. The knife in his calf hurt when the Sakiyan stabbed him but now he can barely feel it. If he could, he'd reach down, grab the knife and return the favour, but he can't move and doesn't have long left. His mind is already foggy, drifting into numbness...

Din's last thought is for the kid, locked up in the Razor Crest, alone, waiting for his return. He'll never see his father come back. One hope still lives: Cara. Din prays she can find the Crest and rescue the child before anything happens to him. She will, he knows she will. He just wishes his beskar could be returned to his people, but the Sakiyan is likely going to strip Din's corpse of everything he has on himself.

“You kicked the bucket yet, Mando?” the Sakiyan snarls. Din can feel her voice closer to his ear, like she's leaning over him. He tries to open his eyes and only catches a vague shadow in the darkness of the empty warehouse.

“Speaking of buckets...” the woman says in a wicked tone that suggest exactly what her intention is. Din wants to fight, attempts to push her hand away when he feels his helmet lift, but it's useless: there is no energy left in him. His arms fall to his sides in surrender. This is it. He's dying, and he's going to die in humiliation. He's already feeling the cool air upon his lips–

An explosion shakes the ground and sends the Sakiyan flying across the room. Din coughs as the air bursts back into his lungs, burning in the most wonderful way. Slowly his sight comes back—there is blinding light where before was darkness—and the shrill hiss in his ears fades; he hears steps. Familiar steps.

The silhouette standing against the light is familiar, too—long strong legs, a hip insolently sticking out with the bottom of a rifle resting against it. Din is still struggling to breathe when he hears a suave voice purring above him.

“Let me guess: that is not a blaster in your pocket and you're just happy to see me.”

His laughs turn into a cough and he doesn't even care. She's here. He doesn't know how but _she's here._

“Cara Dune,” he groans, trying to push himself up into a sitting position. “You surely know how to light up a room.”

He hears a snort that could easily be a laugh; he can't squint her faces into focus but he can easily picture it, smug smirk and everything, and just the thought of it bring a smile to his face—his blissfully hidden face.

“Nice to see you too, smartass,” she chuckles, holding out her free hand to help him stand. The knife planted in his calf is hurting again, though Din has to admit he's never been happier to experience pain. Cara helps him hop to a dusty crate and carefully sits him down before reaching the Sakiyan to kick her gun away from her unconscious body and cuff her up wrists and ankles. After checking the bounty has no weapons hidden under her clothes, Cara returns to Din and bends a knee to check his injury up close.

“What are you doing here?” he asks, flinching when she pours disinfectant all over his wound before pulling the knife out without the slightest warning.

“Got your distress call,” she says over his cry of pain.

“I didn't–” _–send any distress call,_ he was going to stress, but she glances up at him with a shit-eating grin.

“Let me rephrase: your kid's chubby face wouldn't stop popping out on my screen this morning.”

“It could have been a technical issue.”

Cara quirks an eyebrow at him, “Or it could have been because you're lost without me.” She unceremoniously cuts off a piece of Din's cloak and wraps it tightly around the small clean cloth she used to stop the bleeding.

“You're lucky you were hunting within the parsec,” she says, pulling him up from the crate. “I almost didn't get here in time.”

Din's balance isn't very stable and Cara has to slip under his arm to support him. He hangs onto her, perhaps a bit more intently than he's supposed to; the firm grip of her arm around his waist makes him forget the throbbing pain in his calf.

“You saved my life,” he grunts as he follows her, limping, toward the exit—or the spot where the exit used to be before Cara blew the entire wall up.

“Yeah, you can thank me later,” she grumbles. The unnecessary tightness in how she's holding on to him tells him she's as glad as he is that they're both here. “Come on,” she adds dismissively, “let's get you back to the green brat. You owe him some thanks, too.”

Din almost cannot think. He sits on the ramp of Cara's ship—an old T-85 X-Wing whose rusty colours somehow match her armour—and watches as she loads his speeder bike and the still unconscious bounty, his brain still too fresh out of a near death to fully process what is happening around him. This was supposed to be his first big hunt after leaving Nevarro, but what once would have been a relatively easy job this time had seemed above his abilities, which was preposterous because everyone knows he's the best hunter in the Guild. He's always worked alone and with remarkable results, yet suddenly it's like something isn't right, like he's missing something.

Or someone.

He can't stop thinking about it while they fly to the small plain where he left the Crest before leaving to track down the Sakiyan, and the more he rolls the thought in his mind, the more he realises what the issue really is: he's _unbalanced._

All it took to alter his axis was a few days with Cara and the perfect synchrony they shared. Fighting beside her was like having the advantage of extra limbs and extra dexterity, two extra eyes to see and react. He got so used, and so quickly, to be one mind in two bodies with her that now, apparently, he's going to have to learn how to be on his own all over again, to fight along and think as a single being with only two arms, two legs, two eyes. He hadn't even noticed how dependent he was on Cara's presence until he found himself overpowered by an adversary he once could have fought with an arm behind his back.

He stays quiet all the way back to the Razor Crest, at least until they get inside and find the child crying fat tears with his metal ball clutched in his tiny hands.

“It's okay, buddy,” Cara says gently as she scoops him up from the floor one-armed, her other arm still stubbornly curled around Din's waist. Without a word, she places the the weeping child against Din's chest and Din is forced to hastily drop his rifle to hold him. He meets his big, glossy eyes and feels his heart sink: things could have gone very wrong, today, and it could have cost him not only his own life, but his foundling's too. This can't possibly work. Din can't do this alone.

Cara drags across the ship and pushes him down into a seat in the common area, then fetches the med-kit and kneels at his feet to take care of his wound. It shouldn't come as a shock, but Din still marvels at how at home Cara feels in the ship: she moves confidently, knows where to find things and complains when there is not enough of something.

“I can't believe you haven't resupplied the bacta,” she's grumbling as she unfastens the makeshift dressing around Din's calf. She glances up at him with a sharp scowl that pierces through his helmet. “With your talent for getting hurt, you should keep _barrels_ of that in here, you stupid laser-brain. This is barely enough to fix this shit.”

Din knows he's not supposed to, but he smiles all the same. Cara's very peculiar repertoire of terms of endearment is something he will never tire of hearing. He misses it, actually: the old Crest's an awfully quiet place without her, even with the kid and his shenanigans.

“I leave you to yourself for one lousy month, and you nearly get yourself killed,” she snorts. She's cleaning the wound and the obvious irritation makes her normally gentle touch harsh and frantic. “You even have the nerve to let me find a half empty med-kit. How am I supposed to patch up your sorry ass with _one_ dressing roll and _barely_ a bottle of bacta, huh?”

“It's like I'm not enough, all of a sudden,” Din sighs. It's not meant to be an excuse, but rather an apology, though he doubts it would make any difference to Cara. “I guess I was used to having you watching my back.”

Cara swats his leg playfully. “You could just say you've missed me, you know?”

Yes, he guesses he could.

Cara keeps grumbling complaints while she disinfects, sutures, and finally wraps it all up with the only gauze roll left in Din's medical supplies. The child surveys the entire process, his ears perked up with interest. His face is still damp from all the crying but the little happy noises he's letting out are a huge comfort to Din's guilty conscience and they slowly make Cara's frown turn into a smile. It's this smile that makes him realise what he's been refusing to realise so far.

“I took you for granted.”

He bites his tongue, hearing his voice uttering what wasn't meant to be uttered at all. The kid looks up at him expectantly; Cara doesn't even look up.

“Uh?”

Din has two options, at this point: let it go and pretend he said nothing, or just face the fact that, without Cara, he's going to have to learn to be on his own all over again. Which is not undoable, but it would require time and an awful lot of bruises and possibly worse—no small feat, since he apparently can't even keep his med-kit supplied, all of a sudden. Everything used to be simple, before Cara, then everything was simple _with_ Cara; now her absence seems to prevent everything from working as it originally did.

“I thought you would be coming with me,” he blurts, like he's ripping out a giant thorn from his chest. “I didn't think you'd want to... leave.”

 _Leave me._ That's what he's supposed to say, because that's what he's thinking. He's clearly not as brave as he thinks he is.

Cara's hands still in the middle of rearranging the medical equipment, or what is left of it, back into the box.

“I didn't think you'd care,” she mutters. She goes back to stuffing the equipment into the box, but it's haphazard, now, as if she doesn't care about order any more and just wants to get it done as fast as possible. She closes the box and makes to stand up, but Din grabs her wrist, stops her before her knees can rise from the floor.

“It's my fault,” he says, and it's not really a confession so much as an epiphany: his personal feelings have never played an active role in his life as a hunter and whatever concerns them as always been an unimportant matter, irrelevant to the point he forgot what it was like to deal with emotions. He tries to explain, “I don't know how to show– I never felt–”

But it's not easy. It's like trying to speak a language he barely knows: the idea is there, bright and clear; however, words are tough to combine to express the meaning he needs them to take, and he knows his speech sounds chunky, hesitant. It's clear he's not a native speaker of this alien tongue, but all he has is trying, and if he's lucky Cara has enough grasp on this language to understand what he's struggling to tell her.

She's still kneeling before him, silent; her eyes are transfixed on he child's little hand wrapped tightly around Din's finger. Absently, or so it seems to Din, she sneaks a finger into the kid's free hand and cracks a blue half a smile when he grabs it with a happy giggle.

“Why didn't you say something?”

Din doesn't know what to make of her small, brittle tone. She's not even looking at him, which makes it even harder for him to read her. He imagines this is what she feels like all the time, looking at him through a beskar mirror, trying to decipher his clumsy verbal patchwork.

“I didn't think _you_ would care,” he murmurs, and it's slightly funny, though perhaps a bit sad, that they drifted apart they both believed the other wouldn't care while, in fact, they both cared so much they couldn't even talk about it. And this is what _not talking_ led them.

Still mesmerised by her finger clutched into the kid's firm grip, Cara lets her lips stretch out into a wistful grin that she turns up to Din with a glimmer of mischief in her eyes.

“Looks like we have a communication problem.”

Despite himself, Din lets out a light laugh. “There are... _things_ I don't know how to say,” he admits, uncomfortably aware of how true this is. Cara taps her fist upon his knee, shaking her head indulgently.

“There is only so much I can guess, buddy,” she replies softly, all irritation gone from her face. “And this thing doesn't really help,” she continues, touching two fingers in the middle of his visor.

“You know what I mean, right?” she asks, head tipped to one side. “A lot of stuff can be conveyed by exchanging a look, but if two people can't look each other in the eye, some things just need to be spoken.”

Din feels helpless. He can fight warriors, mudhorns, mechs, but when it comes to put himself into words he stumbles—falls, most of the times. And when these black eyes are staring at him so intensely, his helplessness degenerates into sheer panic. It's too much—what he has inside, what Cara makes him feel. It's powerful and inescapable, like the warm flame the child has ignited inside him, but the child doesn't need words, doesn't need complicated explanations.

“Is it too late?” Din inquires, just a shy whisper that almost doesn't make it past his lips.

“For what?”

“To speak.”

It feels like a leap of courage greater than Din can take, but Cara's gaze is warm and understanding.

“Depends on what you wanna say,” she says in a way that suggests she knows exactly what he wants to say. And Din fumbles to find the right expression, the right thing to say without making it sound too big, too scary, even if it is—not just big and scary, but huge and terrifying. He would have never thought one day he would need more than just himself to survive—to live. But he does, and all he needs is right here... he would be a fool to let any of this go.

So he takes a deep breath, lets his hand glide upon Cara's on his knee, and gives it a gentle squeeze.

 _Stay with me,_ he wants to say. _Travel with me. Work with me. Live with me._ What he says, instead, is just, “Would you consider a permanent collaboration?”

He sees a corner of Cara's mouth twitch upward. Her thumb brushes over the side of Din's gloved hand, over and over. He wishes it was bare.

“Define _permanent.”_

He scrutinises her like she can see him, trying to will the silent plea in his eyes past the barrier of his helmet. _Some things just need to be spoken._

“As long as we want it to last.”

He can feel Cara's grip tighten over his knee, fingertips dipping into his skin. He's not sure what she's thinking until he spots the dimples in her cheeks as she bites her lower lip, looking up at him with a knowing grin.

“Or as long as we don't drive each other crazy.”

It sounds like a promise, rather than a threat.

“Is that a yes?” he asks, a bit too eagerly, perhaps, because it makes Cara huff out an amused laugh.

“We do make a good team,” she concedes with a light shrug, “and you obviously can't be trusted with your own life. Right, kid?” She wiggles her finger out of the kid's hand to tickle him under his chin, and he giggles excitedly. Before Cara knows, he's throwing himself into her arms, and she's giggling, too, and holding him so tenderly the sight of it spreads a sudden warmth with Din's swelling heart. He can't help reaching out for this kid to ruffle the thin fuzzy hairs on his head.

“You're siding with her, now, womp rat?”

Cara glances at Din from over the child's shoulder. “Or maybe he's just being a cute little wingman.”

“What's a wingman?”

It's a genuine question, but Cara frowns at him like he's joking or something.

“Never mind,” she chuckles once she seems to realise he's serious. Din takes a mental know to look _wingman_ up, as soon as he has a chance.

“You still haven't answered my question.”

Cara sits back on the balls of her feet. She sits the kid on her lap and stares at Din intently.

“Before I answer,” she says, somehow making it sound like a warning, “is this a question that would require me to look into your eyes to fully comprehend its meaning?”

Din isn't sure what he's supposed to reply. Considering the amount of things his mind couldn't seem to put into actual words, he supposes his expression would have probably been helpful. If only he could give this to her...

“I think so,” he sighs, like it's a defeat, but Cara smiles and stands up in one fluid motion.

“Well, then.” She offers him her hand and helps him rise to his feet. “I accept, but on one condition: we're going to learn to use big, scary words. I don't want any misunderstandings between us.”

It's a challenge, but it cannot be worse than operating at half of his potential. Maybe he's always been at half of his potential, before he met her, and he just didn't know. Maybe— _likely_ —she brings out the best of him and he just _feels_ useless, apart from her.

He nods. “I can do that.”

“I guess we have a deal.”

Smirking, like she knows there is more than what has been said, Cara raises a hand and Din finds himself clasping it, squeezing tight.

Later, when she's carrying the bounty to the carbonite storage room, Din observes her with his arms crossed, a question lingering on his tongue. It's only when they bid each other goodnight and Cara is about to return to her ship that he finally finds the guts to ask, “Have you been feeling like this, too? Like a part of you was missing?”

She stops halfway down the ramp. Slowly she turns back, blaster casually thrown over a shoulder.

“Not really,” she shrugs, but before Din can be hurt by this admission she adds with a soft smile, “More like I wasn't myself at all.”

She winks and turns her back to him again, disappearing into the night.

Din stands there, frozen.

Those were the words he was looking for but couldn't find: without Cara, he didn't feel _incomplete._ He simply felt like someone he didn't know how to be any more.

**Author's Note:**

> Nothing much to say about this one, it wrote itself and I just rolled with it. It all sparked from one single line that popped up in a conversation between Name1 and I (who's surprised? Nobody), which is “Let me guess: that is not a blaster in your pocket and you're just happy to see me.”  
> Again, nobody is surprised, right?
> 
> I'm about to head to a christening I don't want to attend and be around people I don't want to see (at least there's going to be food, afterwards). Please, send love, I'm going to need it.


End file.
